Sarah Morris: Transactional Authority
2026-01-31 – 2026-04-05
Summary
Information about the Exhibition
| Dates | January 31 – April 5, 2026 Closed on Mondays, February 24 (open on February 23) |
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| Opening hours | 10:00 – 17:00 (last entry 16:30) |
| Venue | Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka 5F Galleries |
| Organizer | Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka |
| Sponsorship | Kevin P. Mahaney Center for the Arts Foundation SAKURA COLOR PRODUCTS CORPORATION |
| Cooperation | RIHGA Royal Hotel Osaka, Vignette Collection |
| Grant | The Obayashi Foundation |
| Support provided by | the U.S. Consulate General Osaka-Kobe |
| Admission fee | Adults: 1800 yen (groups 1600 yen) University / High school students: 1200 yen (groups 1000 yen) Junior high school / Elementary students: Free admission Member privileges (free admission, discounts) are available for this exhibition [3-set Tickets (a set of 3 Adults tickets)] 4500yen *3 people can see the exhibition separately, or one person can see it 3 times. *ticket sales: December 1, 2025 (10:00) – January 30, 2026 (23:59) [Repeater Discount] Get a 200yen Discount for the Second Visit * Prices include tax. Group prices are for groups of at least 20 visitors. * Persons holding an official Disability Certificate are admitted for half the price of a sameday ticket (including one attendant). Apply at the ticket counter (2F) on the day. (No advance reservation required.) * Certification of eligibility for special rates must be presented before admission for all except regular adult rates. * The museum may close without notice in the event of disasters or other circumstances beyond our control. |
Highlights
1. First major solo exhibition in Japan, one of the largest in Asia
2. More than 90% of the works are being shown in Japan for the first time
3. A newly commissioned wall painting will be created for this exhibition and Morris’s film, “Sakura”, shot in Osaka in 2018
Artist profile
Photo: Anna Gaskell
Sarah Morris Born in the UK in 1967, Sarah Morris is based in New York. The internationally acclaimed artist is known for her geometric abstract paintings using diagrammatic grids. Since the 1990s, Morris has produced a large body of work using paintings, films, site-specific wall paintings drawings, and sculptures which reflect her interest in networks, typologies, architecture and the city. She sees her paintings as self-generating, open to interpretation, motion and change, giving the viewer a heightened sense that they are part of a larger system. Creating a virtual architecture of forms, the work incorporates a wide array of subjects from multinational corporations to transportation networks and maps, GPS technology and even lunar cycles. In her films, a parallel practice, Morris explores the psycho-geography and the dynamic nature of cities in flux through the multi-layered and fragmented narratives they contain. The situations the artist places herself and the viewers within reflect the hierarchies we inhabit.
Overview
An introduction to Sarah Morris’s entire oeuvre, including about 40 paintings and 17 films
The exhibition features about 40 of Morris’s iconic paintings, from her earliest to latest works. Moreover, her films, which she created in tandem with her paintings, will all be shown, including a new film. The exhibition will be presented in chronological order throughout her entire oeuvre which reflects on the flux of major cities around the world, depicting their intricately intertwined cultural, political, and economic structures with beauty, tension and ambivalence through both painting and film.
A new wall painting for this exhibition and a film on Japan
Sarah Morris, Lippo [Paul Rudolph], 2024
Household paint on wall, 6.74 × 20.95 m © Sarah Morris.
Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary
*Reference Image
The exhibition will also feature works related to Japan, including a large-scale new wall painting created especially for the exhibition and the film “Sakura” which she shot in various places in the Kansai region during 2018.
Works
Sign painting series
Morris began to work seriously as an artist in New York in the 1990s. Her early Sign paintings emerged from the hardware store signages that designated boundaries. The constitutional rights to bear arms and protect property are behind the imperatives “BEWARE OF THE DOG” or “NO LOITERING”. With the reduced language of the signs, the artist maps an aspect of the prevalent paranoia in the USA.
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Sarah Morris, Beware of the Dog, 1994
Household gloss paint on canvas, 122 × 170 cm. Private collection. © Sarah Morris
Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
Midtown series
In the early 1990’s Sarah Morris rents a cheap studio at 42nd Street, near Times Square, where the contrast between shady nightlife and the glossy facades of big US-corporations is ever-present. The “Midtown” series is based on high-rise buildings in Midtown Manhattan representing centers of the global economy, including the Seagram Building (designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson). Morris surveys the tension-filled district with her camera, collects fragments of architecture and translates them into paintings. The gridded compositions of Midtown’s buildings stay apparent, while the glossy color adds a psychological reading of the architecture.
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Sarah Morris, Midtown - Seagram with Fluorescents, 1999
Household gloss paint on canvas, 214 × 214 cm. Private collection. © Sarah Morris
Photo: Stephen White -
Seagram Building
*Reference Image
Sound Graph series
“Sound Graph” is a painting series that lies at the intersection of her paintings and films. The series uses speech that Morris recorded while shooting her film “Finite and Infinite Games” as a starting point for the compositions. Featuring hard-edged geometric shapes, the compositions in the paintings progress and recede in patterns that appear to fluctuate across the canvas, creating a sense of volumetric build-up and release, as if as a visual analogy of coding.
Sarah Morris, Society is Abstract Culture is Concrete [Sound Graph], 2018
Household gloss paint on canvas, 214 × 428 cm
Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka
Spiderweb Series
Forced to stay at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Morris turned her attention to something in nature that was close at hand: spiderwebs. Morris used organic structure of spiderwebs as a starting point for this series, fascinated by their seemingly arbitrary yet systematical shapes. The evolving organisms serve as an analogy to urban landscape.
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Sarah Morris, Dilemma [Spiderweb], 2020
Household gloss paint on canvas, 214 × 271cm. White Cube. ©Sarah Morris
Courtesy of the Artist and White Cube -
Sarah Morris, Courtship [Spiderweb], 2021
Household gloss paint on canvas, 271 × 214 cm. White Cube. © Sarah Morris.
Courtesy of the Artist and White Cube
Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
Film work: Sakura
In tandem with her paintings depicting major cities around the world, Morris also creates films based on her experiences in those places. “Sakura” was filmed when she visited Kansai during the cherry blossom season in 2018.
Her footage captures various locations, including a factory that produces Cray-Pas oil pastels, a bunraku puppet theater stage, and a nightlife district. “Sakura” is a tale of Japan’s original mercantile and cultural capital. Looking at Osaka as a twin city or ghost capital, the film takes the city’s continual reinvention as a mirror unto Japan’s economic and cultural lineage. Morris slices through the urban space to reveal an archeological cross section where the ghosts of the past and concepts for the future are put forth, captured, and endlessly reflected. The film, a complex psychological panorama of the politics of situations, exploits the boundaries of documentary and fiction, and collates the city’s unique duration of time. “Sakura” was shot at the moment when the Sakura tree blossoms over a three- to four-day period and people travel from all over the world to witness that durational spectacle.
This film has a special connection to the museum, as the catalyst for its creation was NAKKA’s construction as a new art museum celebrating Osaka as a city of culture.
Sarah Morris, Sakura, 2018
HD Digital, 50:06 mins
Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka
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Sarah Morris, SM Outlined Reverse [Initials], 2011
Household gloss paint on canvas, 214 × 214 cm. Private collection. © Sarah Morris
Photo: Christopher Burke -
Sarah Morris, SRHMRRS3, 2001
Household gloss paint on canvas, 256.5 × 198 cm. Private collection. © Sarah Morris
Photo: Stephen White -
Sarah Morris, Vitasoy [Hong Kong], 2024
Household gloss paint on canvas, 207 × 152.5 cm. White Cube. © Sarah Morris
Photo: Tom Powel Imaging -
Sarah Morris, Bully Nurse, 1997
Household gloss paint on canvas, 182.8 × 233.68 cm. Private collection. © Sarah Morris
Photo: Stephen White